During their discussion Martin highlighted the fact that criminal justice issues surrounding sentencing and mandatory minimums have come into the forefront in the past six years since he and President Obama have been in office.

Holder told Martin, “People tend to forget one basic thing, that I am a prosecutor.”

“I’ve spent most of my professional life as a prosecutor and as a judge. I’vehad the ability to see the impact of a variety of policies, mass incarceration — we are five percent of the world’s population with 25 percent of the world’s prison population.”

Attorney General Holder went to say, “We’ve had to ask some really fundamental questions, arethe approaches we are taking really productive and so speaking to people in the field, using my own experience we’ve come up with a variety of new ways to approach these issues under our Smart on Crime initiative.”

Holder added, “I think that we’re starting to see impact of that.”

“For the first time in 40 years the lowered federal prison rate, at the same time we’re seeing crime rates coming down. We’ll have some numbers that we will be introducing over the next couple of weeks that show this new approach is actually working.